Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Writing in National Review ,  Red Jahncke, president of Townsend Group International and a Connecticut political columnist, advises that Republican members of the General Assembly should not sign off on what is being called a compromise budget, because a solution to long-term financial obligations -- AKA “fixed costs” -- has been excised from the only budget to have passed in both Houses of the General Assembly, a Republican production. “There is actually one document,” Jahncke writes, “which provides insight into the fundamentals driving the state’s fiscal deterioration: the Executive Order Resource Allocation Plan for Fiscal Year 2018 by which Malloy has been running the state since July 1 in the absence of a budget.”   The figures Malloy relies upon in this document are stark and brutal—but they are reliable:

The SEBAC-Malloy-Aresimowicz agreement passed in the state House, moved to the State Senate and was affirmed there on a party line vote, Republicans opposing the backroom deal in both chambers of the General Assembly. Hours before the Senate vote, leading Democrats, who have not  yet  submitted a budget, warned opposition party members that the earth would tumble into the sun if the SEBAC “concession” deal did not pass.

According to a Hartford business reporter , the deal struck between Governor Dannel Malloy and SEBAC, state employee union representatives, is “solid” and “good for taxpayers.” According to Red Jahncke , President of The Townsend Group, a business consulting firm in Connecticut, the deal is more of the same. And the same road has led Connecticut into a dead end. Following the usual route to budget reconciliation and economic prosperity for Connecticut, the Malloy administration has plunged the state into continuing budget deficits and entrepreneurial flight, which has reduced state revenues despite two massive tax increases, giving new meaning to the expression “more is less.”